A Tourist's Thoughts on the Mega Man X SNES Trilogy

I’m what some people would call a “tourist” when it comes to the Mega Man franchise.  I didn’t grow up with the blue bomber and I didn’t play any of the games until the Anniversary Collection on the Gamecube and even then I didn’t follow the franchise loyally.  Later I would go through almost the entire classic franchise again thanks to the Legacy Collections and Capcom Arcade Stadium 2.

My opinions on the classic games echo most other people’s: the sequels are all fairly fun, sometimes exceedingly difficult, action platformers with basic stories.  Everyone has a different favorite, but it’s generally agreed that the sequels are of a consistent quality.  The first game is stinky.

I don’t like to give my thoughts or a review on something if I can simply point to someone else’s opinion perfectly matching my own so I didn’t think it would be interesting to go over the classic Mega Man series.  The most controversial thing I can say is that the earlier games are frustrating without save states of some kind.  My personal favorite is 8, for the record, even with the godawful acting.

Classic Mega Man’s sequel series, Mega Man X, is a whole different ballgame.  The things people have said about the Mega Man X games are all over the place and after playing them over the course of this year I think my thoughts about that particular branch of the Mega Man franchise might be a little more interesting.  I have some takes that fans might consider “spicy.”

What makes Mega Man X more interesting to me is its storytelling.  The classic games had stories, but they rarely did anything beyond a new plan from Doctor Wawee that results in 8 robot masters to fight.  The X games have actual plot progression, some character development and continuity with more cutscenes and dialogue.  Sure they don’t go a lot deeper than there being a bad guy that must be defeated, but I’m the Shonen Otaku.  I play fighting games.  As long as the heroes, the rogue’s gallery and the stakes are all established, I’m good to go.

Obviously the story is complimented by the high-speed wall-jumping sword-slashing Megman X gameplay, but a good story can make up for lackluster gameplay in my eyes, which might contribute to making some of my takes seem “spicy” to the people who put a more critical focus on game design.

While I’m giving my thoughts on the games, they will not be full reviews.  I won’t be going over the many gameplay changes.  I’m going to assume that most people reading this have played the games on the two Mega Man X Legacy Collections at least and if they haven’t, plenty of people more qualified than me have explained the gameplay mechanics and changes in the over 3 decades the franchise has been around.  Try the Somecallmejohnny videos he did on the X series, for example.  I will, however, be going over the plot of each game because storytelling is a big part of what I look for in a game and maybe some fans that comment can clarify some things for me because some aspects of the story aren’t always clear to me.

The mainline Mega Man X games are often split into 3 eras: the SNES trilogy, the PS1 trilogy and the PS2 duology that probably would have been a trilogy if Capcom made one more.
They can just as well be labeled the X Trilogy, the Zero Trilogy and the Axl duology, if you ask me, since each one has a particular focus on the respective character.

Before starting off with the very first Mega Man X game, there’s some background into the world building.  The X series takes place several years into the future of the classic series.  Dr. Light and Dr. Wily, ever the eternal rivals, both created robots that would last into the future long after they died.  Dr. Light created Mega Man X to give hope to the future and Wily created Zero presumably to be evil and destroy Light’s creations.  Wily creating Zero isn’t implied in the X series until later, but remember, I played the arcade games.

"MINE has fabulous hair!"

X was special because he was given complete free will.  In the classic games, while robots were expressive and their own persons, it’s often brought up that they’re bound by the laws of robotics, meaning they have to obey humans and can’t harm them.  X is not bound by such laws and thus has complete and total autonomy.

X is later discovered by the leading robotics expert of the future, Dr. Cain, who reverse engineers X’s unique free will programming to make a whole new type of robot with that same free will, giving them the name Reploids.  Even with their freedom, Reploids are still made to be friendly to humans, but if one goes rogue they are branded as mavericks.

To keep the threat of mavericks under control, Dr. Cain created a team of reploids to hunt them down, naming them the very self-explanatory Maverick Hunters.  They’re basically the robot police dealing with other robots, usually resulting in the maverick being destroyed.

Among the Maverick Hunters are X and Zero.  Yes, Zero is X’s friend even though his creator is the sworn enemy of X’s creator.  The reason why isn’t explained yet.  For someone like me, who went into the first game knowing who made Zero, it was an intriguing mystery.

It helps a lot to read some of this prerequisite stuff in the galleries of the Mega Man X Legacy Collections before playing each of the games.  They have the setup for each game’s plot and bios for every key character in every game.  At the very least it’s important to read the information given for the main characters and main villain.  The standard 8 boss enemies in every game aren’t really important to the plot so their bios aren’t mandatory reading, but it does give them more character than the games do.

That’s a lot to know going in, but in contrast the plot of the first Mega Man X game starts the franchise off with a very basic, almost rudimentary plot.  Rudimentary, but a good starting point.

Mega Man X

The first Mega Man X’s plot is a robot rebellion story.  The best, most elite Maverick Hunter named Sigma goes maverick and, with the help of other turncoat hunters, mobilizes an army of reploids to take over humanity, believing that robots are the superior beings that no longer need to be shackled to their human creators.  It’s a very familiar sci-fi premise.

Sigma looks really goofy here.

The Maverick Hunters that are left are tasked with stopping Sigma’s rebellion.  X, the main character, is not the one in charge though.  At this point in the story X is still lower ranked in the Maverick Hunters.  Zero is his superior and at the start of the game he has to save X from the maverick bounty hunter Vile.

Zero orders X to secure different locations of interest around their city by defeating the ex-hunter mavericks Sigma left in charge there while Zero tries to scout out Sigma’s home base so they can launch an assault on the heart of the rebellion.

The in-game plot is loaded into the beginning and end of the game, but it provides adequate motivation to play and the skill-based gameplay works with X’s character.  See, it’s established that X is a lot stronger than he lets on and would be a force to be reckoned with if his pacifist nature didn’t cause him to only use strictly necessary force.  In the gameplay this is reflected by X (and by extension, the player) getting better and stronger in both skill and upgrades until toward the end of the game X is able to defeat Vile with the help of a heroic sacrifice from Zero, who entrusts X with his ultimate arm cannon to finish the mission.

In the end, X, equipped with his friend’s last will, defeats Sigma and his giant Jackal mech suit, surpassing the reploid that used to be the best Maverick Hunter.

It’s a classic hero’s journey with some nice story scripting for a Super Nintendo action game.  It sets the groundwork for the rest of the X series, but it’s also self-contained so if one were to only play this one, they would leave the game satisfied.  In fact, for several years it WAS the only one of the games I played, in a different form.

Of all the varying opinions of the different games in the Mega Man X franchise, the first game is pretty much universally considered to be one of the best.  People who grew up with it on the Super Nintendo ramble on about how much they love it and it was included in the SNES mini among other all-time classics for the console.
Being someone who didn’t get into gaming until the N64 days, I don’t have that nostalgia bias and compared to other action platformers I’ve played over the years, I don’t think it’s as good as the old-school players make it out to be.  That said, it is solid and holds up today for all the same reasons its fans have given for decades: a good soundtrack, tight controls, pretty graphics, the replay value with the stage changes and, for me, a serviceable action story to tie it all together.

There are some seriously bad design decisions that not-insignificantly hurt my enjoyment of it, sadly.  I’m not a fan of how the game practically railroads the player into playing Chill Penguin’s stage first to get the leg upgrade and punishes a player that doesn’t know to do that.  Some of the bosses are next to impossible to beat without the leg part because the game is fast and you need to be able to get out of the way fast.  Storm Eagle is the closest thing to literally impossible to beat without the dash because the only way to beat him without it is to get lucky and hope he never uses his tornado at an inopportune position.  It’s a beginner’s trap and the dash should have been a part of X’s default moveset, something Capcom agrees with because it is in his default moveset in every game afterwards.  That’s easy enough to get around once you’re aware of it though.  There’s no getting around the problem with the endgame.

This will become a recurring complaint, but the Mega Man X games need save states.  The Mega Man classic legacy collections had save states, to different extents, but not these ones.  I can tolerate not having them for most of the game, but their absence is very noticeable in the endgame of the majority of them.
The endgame of a Mega Man X game is usually 3-4 full-length stages, complete with boss fights, all done sequentially.  In the SNES trilogy, you do not get to take a break and shut off the game.  If you do, you have to do every single endgame stage all over again, even if you use a password, and in this game that means doing that godawful enemy-filled vertical hallway again.

If one of the endgame stages is kicking your ass and you need to step away from the game for a while and play something else, or you need to go to bed because you have work in the morning, you can’t.  You have to keep playing until you win or lose your progress.

The final boss area makes it even worse.  It’s bad enough that if you lose to the boss’s final form you have to fight the first form again (and his dog) just to get to that point and potentially die again as part of the learning process, but if you used your sub-tanks against the final boss and lost, you have to refill those sub-tanks, which is agonizing.  The only way to refill the sub-tank in the final area is by constantly, nigh infinitely wall jumping to kill puny robot caterpillars that slowly crawl out of a hole in the wall and may or may not drop health items to refill the sub-tank and on top of all that you need to catch the items as they fall or they’ll disappear when they drop offscreen.  It’s mind-numbingly tedious and I don’t know why I don’t hear more people call it out.  I hate it.

If the collection had save states, I would be able to save before fighting the first phase with full sub-tanks and get right back into the fight to try again when I died, then I would be able to save before fighting the second form so I wouldn’t have to fight the first form over and over and over and over and over and over again.  I already proved I can beat the first form!  Just let me get on with it!  It sours my enjoyment of a game when it fails to stick the landing like this.  It’s a good thing then that there’s a better option.

The first game’s remake, Maverick Hunter X, was my first Mega Man X game and it is better than the original in every way.  Maverick Hunter X makes all the best things about the original better and changes or excises some of the worst parts.

Maverick Hunter X adds cutscenes and dialogue, including conversations before every Maverick fight (like later Mega Man X games), all with full voice acting.  The actors aren’t a Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes team of A-listers, but they do a good job and I recognize some of them from the 1999 Hunter X Hunter anime, one of my favorite anime of all time.  When you beat the game it doubles down on the storytelling additions with an over 20 minute anime prequel movie called Day of Sigma.  It is strange to me that I have to get to the END of the story to unlock the BEGINNING of it, but those with the either Legacy Collection get Day of Sigma right from the start in the gallery.

Maverick Hunter X ups the presentation of the gameplay too.  It runs at a consistent frame rate, everything has more animation frames, the stages have more background details and I think the remixed music is better than the original.  It would’ve been nice to have the option of using the original soundtrack though, like the Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles had for its Rondo of Blood remake.

Maverick Hunter X’s changes to the level design also make it more consistently fun from beginning to end (taking out that cursed vertical hallway section), but it didn’t fix everything.  My problem with the dash upgrade wasn’t changed (only the location of it was) and my problems with the final boss stage weren’t fixed either, at least in the actual stage.  The multiple sections of the endgame are segmented and selectable from the stage select menu without needing to do the entire thing in one go and one of the final boss’s more difficult to avoid attacks was changed into something more manageable.  Thank you, pre-evil Capcom.

Was that so hard?

There’s also a mode where you play as Vile, which isn’t fun, and a demo for the original Mega Man’s remake, Mega Man: Powered Up that only has Cut Man’s stage.  They aren’t worth noting.  You get Maverick Hunter X for the main campaign.

The original Mega Man X is still decent overall and you aren’t missing a drastically different game in terms of gameplay, but I highly recommend picking up Maverick Hunter X if you have a PSP or Vita.  It’s the superior version for me, hands down.

Mega Man X2

With a lot of self-contained stories that end with the villainous ringleader being defeated, the viewer is left to assume that the cause they were leading peters out after the credits roll, but when there’s a sequel you can bet one of the plots they’re going to bring out is about the remnants of the villain’s army.  That’s what Mega Man X2 does.

You go, Green Biker dude!

After Sigma’s defeat, achieved thanks in part to Zero’s sacrifice, the Maverick Hunters are hunting down the last of Sigma’s army of Mavericks.  The elite mavericks X is hunting down are just a distraction, however.  A trio of villains behind the scenes scheme to resurrect Zero and bring the powerful Maverick Hunter to their side using his parts that they snagged from Sigma’s fortress after the first game.  The one thing they’re missing is Zero’s control chip, which I guess is the lynchpin that makes the body function or contains his soul or something.  Dr. Cain has the control chip in his possession so before long the trio challenges X to battle them with the 3 parts of Zero on the line.  Since they’re after X for the control chip, this trio of villains is named the X Hunters.

The priority of the premise is obviously to bring Zero back while tying up the maverick rebellion from the first game and I think it was the right idea to make bringing Zero back a concerted effort rather than a cop-out.  I also like that there’s a slight story change if you manage to get all of Zero’s parts, but not so much of a change that you miss anything if you don’t get them.  All it does is remove one boss toward the end of the game that isn’t terribly hard if you know what you’re doing.  I like that extra little bit of game-based storytelling where the player’s actions dictates what happens, however minor it may be.

Art by Ryan Gilleece

Being able to repair Zero also sets a precedence for the reveal at the end of the game that the mavericks rebuilt Sigma, making it feel like less of an excuse to bring the main villain back.  The final phase of the boss also hints at Sigma’s true nature, which the next game builds on.

Mega Man X2’s story has more moving parts than the first game, but only a few.  The maverick bosses are only there to distract X and the X Hunters are little more than additions to Sigma’s army.  The plot does what it needs to, as does the gameplay.  X2 doesn’t stray far from what the original game did in its gameplay, but it does some things worse.

A recurring problem with X2 is that there are situations that appear to be made with the ability to crouch in mind, but you can’t.  There are enemies that are too low for the mega buster to shoot unless it’s charged or if you use Wheel Gator’s unwieldy weapon.  When I’m having to rapidly shoot enemies that are too low for the mega buster, I hate having to charge it up each and every time when I should be blazing through them with a volley of regular fire.  Some attacks, like one of Agile’s, hit just above your head and it looks like if you were able to duck, you could avoid them, but instead you’re supposed to dash under it, which can result in dashing right into the enemy if you’re in the wrong place.

I’m not a fan of X2’s constant need for dash jumping either.  It seems like areas where you can do a regular jump without dashing are few and far between, whether it’s on the ground or on a wall.  Even if I can pull it off consistently with practice, pressing the dash button slightly before the jump over and over again for the entire game, sometimes in quick succession, gets really tiring and I have to wonder why the designers didn’t just make it some kind of default single button command if they loved it so much.

Flame Stag's stage is the worst offender.

Then there’s the cryptic bullshit peppered throughout the game.  How was I supposed to know that you could charge Bubble Crab’s weapon to get to a little alcove that’s out of sight in a very specific area?  How was I supposed to know I could use Wheel Gator’s weapon on one specific part of one specific stage that looks like any other part of it?  How was I supposed to know there was a heart tank in a hidden spot right behind where the player starts one of the stages?  Fuck you.  That’s how.  No visuals to guide the player, no hints, no nothing.  Every Mega Man game has at least a couple of situations like that, but X2 pushes my tolerance to its limit.

Compared to the first game X2 has a lower batting average in terms of fun bosses too.  Bosses like Bubble Crab, Wheel Gator and Crystal Snail are a drag because they make you wait your turn to do damage while using attacks that are nearly unavoidable, but the worst of the bosses are the X-Hunters.  I like the idea of adding some optional bosses that can also influence what stages the player wants to do next, but they’re some of the worst bosses in the X franchise.

Serges is another boss that forces you to wait your turn until he only gives a brief moment to get a shot on him, which is when he unleashes a bullet hell that’s difficult to avoid, all the while he drops mines the mega buster shoots over because you can’t crouch.
Violen’s wrecking ball trajectory is random and will inevitably hit every time, leading to a battle of luck and attrition.  You can’t count on his weakness because it doesn’t make him flinch and it’s quite possibly the suckiest weapon in the franchise, rivaled only by the Top Spin.
Agile can come charging in for a dash attack that activates instantly with no pattern or time to react.  When he isn’t doing that, he’s using a long distance attack that might force you to dash under it, potentially right into him, because we just couldn’t have ducking in this game!
Then they all come back one more time at their arctic base in the endgame, where Violen and Serges are even MORE aggravating to fight!

Agile isn't.

Then, for the final boss, Sigma’s first form is full of difficult to avoid attacks that come out with very little warning and it’s followed by his true form against what we can only at this point assume is his soul, which takes a crap ton of damage to kill!  This is all on top of the problem the first game had: you have to do the endgame all at once!  No turning the game off!  Also, once again, if you die to that damage sponge of a final boss phase, you have to do the first one all over again and you don’t get your sub-tanks back except this time there’s no way to refill them in the room before the boss!  These games need save states!

Mega Man X2 can be fun sometimes, but everything wrong with it builds up as the game goes on and makes it one of my least favorite of the X games.

Mega Man X3

After the end of X2, Sigma’s rebellion is kaput.  He already lost his backup body, the X Hunters and Zero, but the finishing blow is dealt by a reploid scientist named Dr. Doppler.

Doppler claims the reason robots went Maverick was because of a mind-altering computer virus called the Sigma Virus.  Through his research, Doppler developed a counter program for the virus and brought all the Mavericks to his lab to heal them, ridding the world of the threat of Mavericks.

Riding on the high of his success and the subsequent support, Doppler and his robots create Doppletown, a utopia in which reploids and humans can live in peace so long as Aram Fingal stays away.

What the people don’t know is that at some point Doppler became mind controlled by the very virus he was studying and suddenly starts launching robot attacks from Doppletown, prompting the X-hunters to take him down.

At first glance it’s disappointing that the game seems to explain that the Mavericks didn’t rebel out of their own free will, which flies in the face of character bios and the added dialogue in Maverick Hunter X, but I think there’s an implication that the game doesn’t make especially clear.  In the gallery it states that Doppler “claimed” that the mavericks were the result of an evil mind control virus.  That implies the Sigma Virus explanation was a lie for those instances.  It is indeed a real thing, but the mind-controlled Doppler used it as an excuse to bring the mavericks to him and mobilize an army.  If the mavericks loyal to Sigma played along, it would be easy to fool people.
The other possibility is that the Sigma Virus doesn’t take direct control, but rather influences the reasoning of those it infects without them knowing, kind of like with Saren in Mass Effect.  Regardless, all the robot bosses in X3 except for one (Gravity Beetle) are explicitly under the control of this mind-altering Sigma Virus.

This is the game that marks a shift in Sigma’s role in the story.  With no body or loyal followers, Sigma, taking advantage of being a sentient computer virus, is a corrupting force that has to manipulate others into doing his dirty work for him, controlling Doppler to make him a new body and continue his mission to subjugate humans.  People complain about how the villain in the X games is always Sigma, but I like the different ways he acts as the villain.

X3’s story has a strong villain ensemble with more cutscenes and more dialogue.  In addition to his own duo of enforcers, Doppler brings back Vile, an enemy of the invading Maverick Hunters who’s thirsty for revenge and knows them well.  It’s like Bandit Keith in Yu-Gi-Oh R.

Vile, Bit and Byte are more fun to figure out the patterns of and fight than the X-hunters and I like how Doppler’s men combine into one super-mecha if at least one of them lives (I assume a lone one uses the nearby spare parts of the other), which is another thing I like about the storytelling: branching variants and replay value.  Factors like whether Doppler’s enforcers are destroyed by their weakness or whether Zero is still alive by the end create different variants on the end game, making the way the player chooses to play matter even more than in X2.

I think the visuals are a step up from X2’s too.  The stages are a little longer this time around, but there’s such detail put into them that their visuals don’t get repetitive.  Toxic Seahorse’s stage goes from a sewage system to water processing near the dam, Neon Tiger’s goes from a standard forest stage to the glowing undergrowths of their roots and Tunnel Rhino’s goes from caverns have both caverns with flowing water and the energen mines.  In the first 2 games the way the locations looked were generally much more straightforward and not long enough to go much further beyond what was presented in the map screen at face value.  X3’s stages also have far more minibosses, which further sets its stages apart from each other.

To make the stages stand out even more, the soundtrack rocks.  It goes heavy on the simulated guitar with heavy chugging, hard-hitting drum beats and synthesized guitar solos.  X2’s soundtrack didn’t do a lot for me, but X3’s is more my speed.

That sound that plays after you get a new weapon accompanied by a fancy wire frame of said weapon is the stuff that gives me a dopamine hit.

There’s so much I really like about X3, but it all comes crashing down because of one fatal flaw: boss damage!

The bosses in this game do way too much fucking damage!  Every single one of the bosses can potentially kill you in 3 hits with the starting health!  The first step of a Mega Man game is usually the hardest because things get easier once you have a weapon with which to exploit another boss’s weakness, but in X3 every single boss is next to impossible, especially the first time fighting them!  Then, when you inevitably run out of lives, you have to go all the way back to the start of the stage just for another shot, at which point you will almost certainly die in just 3 hits again!

I’ve seen people say the enemies also do too much damage, but that was never an issue for me.  They aren’t any more difficult to deal with than in the previous 2 games and they can drop health pickups to make up for the damage incurred.  Bosses do not drop health pickups and have some tricky attack patterns, which in the other games isn’t a big deal, but X3 is two steps away from asking a player to do a no damage run!  They are the one part of the game where you would want to use Zero as a crutch, but instead it’s the only part of the game where you CAN’T use him!

Knowing how to use him at all is never explained, by the way.

What this means is that the pacing of the game is shot.  Any progress is brought to a screeching halt so the player can gather heart tanks and the armor pieces to stand a chance against the bosses, except most of those armor pieces need the boss weapons to get them and in such a way that you can only get them in a specific order!  We have another leg piece situation like the first game here too.  The leg piece toward the end of Blizzard Buffalo’s stage is needed to get several collectibles, which might as well be mandatory, and a first time player won’t know that.

You get into a routine with X3.  Go to a stage, get the collectibles you can, die, choose another stage to get the collectibles you can, die and repeat that until you have enough heart tanks and sub-tanks to not die in just a few hits from one of the bosses.  I only started making progress after at least an hour of preparing while dying over and over again.  By the time I had enough to beat one of the bosses, I was sick of constantly going through the same stages and was only playing to the end out of obligation.

Of course, you have to do the endgame in one go and have to fight the final boss’s first form if you lose to the second form with no refill for your sub-tanks.  At least this time the golden armor is an option, which lets me wait for the tanks to refill while I went to get a drink from the fridge or something.  It’s better than the stupid caterpillar shaft, but still, this game needs save states.

He's not that hard once you get his simple pattern down.

There’s so much I like about X3 that it’s depressing how badly one major flaw killed any joy I could’ve had with it.  It’s like what happened with Reshef ofDestruction or Mortal Kombat Mythologies.  I decided to try and make X3 fun the same way I made those games fun: cheating.

I don’t mean that I used rookie hunter mode.  I think that mode swings the difficulty too hard in the opposite direction, making the player nearly invincible and making enemies take tons more damage than they should.  Rookie hunter mode isn’t just for a casual playthrough.  It’s for customers at Weenie Hut Jr.’s and anyone playing Mega Man X6, but that’s for next time.

For a second playthrough of Mega Man X3, I used a password that gave me the full armor set from the start and what a tremendous difference that one change made.  It was fun!  It was actually fun!  The damage reduction from the body armor alone made bosses tolerable!  I didn’t have to do Blizzard Buffalo’s stage first just to get the leg upgrade!  I didn’t have to constantly backtrack through stages!  I made progress in the game from the word go while still getting to collect the other upgrades!  If I didn’t know any better I’d swear that X3 was balanced around the player always having the armor upgrade and something changed at the last minute!

It helped my enjoyment a little the second time that I was playing the PS1 version.  I had the old X Collection for the Gamecube long before the Legacy Collections came out, but never got around to playing it until now.  Someone at the store I got it from would draw on the blank used game boxes.

I got a custom box.

The PS1 version of Megman X3 included with the old X Collection is nearly identical to the SNES version, but adds 2 things.  One is some voiceless anime cutscenes, including an animated intro for each of the initial 8 bosses that use the classic stage start jingle.  They add a nice shot of pep to the action.

The second addition is the completely remixed soundtrack on stronger hardware with more audio channels.  If the SNES music sounds like it’s trying to be Guns n’ Roses then the PS1 version’s music sounds like it’s trying to be covers done by Devo, replacing the rockin’ guitar sounds with rockin’ keyboard solos.

Those are nice upgrades for a game with already solid graphics and music, but for those who only have the Legacy Collections and might think the old collection’s worth getting, don’t bother.  The old collection’s version of X3 is the only game in it that’s different from the Legacy Collections and it’s not worth going out of your way for.  The only other thing you’re missing out on is Mega Man: Battle and Chase, a really crappy throwaway go-karting game.

Just like with Reshef of Destruction and MK Mythologies, the fact that I have to cheat to have fun with Mega Man X3 leaves me with mixed feelings.  That there is fun in any circumstance at least means there’s a good game in there, but if I have to judge the game purely based on how it’s meant to be played normally, it’s a disappointment.  I can recommend it with the full armor password.  That’s something, at least.

Next time I’ll go over the PS1 trilogy/the Zero trilogy.  Oh boy... X6.